[HN Gopher] I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once ...
___________________________________________________________________
I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again
Author : vehbisarikaya
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-02-28 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| notacanofsoda wrote:
| Can someone provide more background? Did he leave the CEO
| position before? Who was CEO in the interim?
| jeroen wrote:
| Kyle Vogt, who co-founded autonomous driving company Cruise in
| 2013, has been named CEO. He has served as as interim CEO since
| December 2021 when Dan Ammann, who had been CEO since 2018,
| abruptly left Cruise.
|
| -- https://www.therobotreport.com/cruise-co-founder-vogt-ceo-
| au...
| mandeepj wrote:
| > abruptly left Cruise
|
| There's more to it. The prior CEO wanted an IPO for Cruise
| but the GM CEO did not. So, you know how it turned out
|
| Edit -> changed gm to GM (General Motors, parent co. of
| Cruise)
|
| Edit 2 -> grammar correction
| gowld wrote:
| What's a "gm CEO" ?
| mandevil wrote:
| General Motors, the car company that owns Cruise, has a
| Chief Executive Officer, Mary Barra.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| The CEO of General Motors.
| [deleted]
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Same as an ordinary CEO but with a gene from fish oil for
| extra lustre?
|
| (I'm just burning karma for jokes again because it is
| late)
| mandeepj wrote:
| What's common in these names - Steve (Apple), Satya, and Kyle?
|
| They all rejected the job when it was first offered to them. It
| should be a case study and research topic. I think the takeaway
| here is - don't accept the CEO job right away; conditionally, you
| should be inside the company. At least that was the case with the
| above individuals.
| sanguy wrote:
| Cruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack
| of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the
| US.
|
| They have had several tenders for the data required to build out
| the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear
| the critical knowledge is gone.
| jowday wrote:
| Confusingly enough, Cruise has nothing to do with Super-Cruise.
| Super-Cruise is handled by an in-house team at GM.
| andrewia wrote:
| From what I know, GM Super Cruise is unrelated to Cruise LLC.
| GM has been developing Super Cruise on their own since 2013,
| and the system relies on a forward-facing camera and 3 radars
| (front and blind spots) to navigate the road. It links the
| camera's lane recognition data to 3D road maps stored onboard
| to anticipate the road ahead. It's also restricted to limited-
| access roads where pedestrians aren't a concern.
|
| Cruise AVs are much different. They appear to use LIDAR, radar,
| and camera data to understand their surroundings including
| intersections, pedestrians, and road hazards.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Thanks, that is confusing, was just going to ask if super
| cruise uses lidar. I see the answer is no.
|
| So who is the CEO of super cruise?
| kingforaday wrote:
| Generally asking. How does something like this get top three spot
| on HN? Submitted 30 mins ago and first comment 4 mins ago by a
| user whose only submission is this. Just curious on the
| mechanics.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Lots of people upvoting it in a short period of time and nobody
| flagging it?
|
| The HN ranking algorithm seems to put a lot of weight into both
| velocity and flags.
|
| A few factors that may have caught people's attention to
| upvote: it's about an HN company, the author is an HN regular,
| everything you need to know is in the title, it's written in
| first-person, and it's a bit unusual for someone to return as
| CEO.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| People like self driving cars and news about that space.
| callesgg wrote:
| Lots of people upvoting in the new section.
|
| I think that ycombinator sometimes forces up their own links,
| but that tends to be more obviously related to them like hiring
| staff to various startups.
| gowld wrote:
| > be more obviously related to them like hiring staff to
| various startups.
|
| Those are inline ads, impossible to vote or comment on.
| heratyian wrote:
| maybe if it's about a yc company?
| [deleted]
| timy2shoes wrote:
| I suspect it's because kvogt is an active member of HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kvogt. His (long-form)
| insight into this will be valuable to hear.
| president wrote:
| YC people have secret controls in their account!
| greatpostman wrote:
| I was thinking the same. YC claims they don't manipulate
| rankings, but it's pretty clear this front page is "curated"
| robbomacrae wrote:
| If i recall correctly the Hacker News ranking gives new items a
| bit of a boost... possibly more-so for some random users, in
| order to give them a chance at getting some traction. You might
| be able to find out more here:
|
| https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...
|
| https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...
| im3w1l wrote:
| The race to get the first self-driving car on the market is
| pretty interesting.
| rmason wrote:
| I'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a
| long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was
| better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted
| and they thought had a clue on tech.
|
| Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the
| founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not
| understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.
| reTensor wrote:
| Kyle Vogt was removed from the CEO position in late 2018 after
| Cruise failed to make progress toward a number of milestones.
| The milestones were outlined as part of the Cruise acquisition.
|
| Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress.
| Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it
| is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's
| consistent record of failure.
|
| Unfortunately, Ammann disagreed with GM's CEO about Cruise's
| future as a business. Employees at my level of seniority don't
| know the details, but many of us are skeptical that Kyle is the
| right man for the job.
| ghostedbycruise wrote:
| what is Cruise's hiring process like atm? I'm very interested
| in the AV space as a new grad and have worked on a relevant
| project with a real vehicle, but never heard back.
|
| Is MS the bare minimum required?
| technofiend wrote:
| At least according to Tech Crunch it was because Ammann also
| failed to deliver something on Barra's agenda [1]:
|
| _And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand,
| there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a
| commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent
| the past two years inching toward that commercialization
| goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone
| through a spate of consolidation._
|
| Most likely that's a lot harder to get done than anyone
| thinks. Is Vogt really the guy to make it happen? I guess
| we'll find out. But GM sending an otherwise successful VP
| packing after more than a decade there signals they are
| looking to shake things up. GM is _not_ Silicon Valley and
| even senior execs IMHO enjoy longer tenures that you 'd find
| in the Valley. They also skipped over the whole reassigning
| him to another role / oh he's left to pursue other interests
| tap dancing you often see to give people some runway or cover
| to leave. Not sure whether to read anything into that or if
| that's just how Barra operates.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/16/longtime-gm-exec-dan-
| amman...
| [deleted]
| reTensor wrote:
| The failure to launch in 2019 was shortly after Ammann took
| over (late 2018).
|
| Ammann inherited Vogt's mess, and at that time nobody in
| management fully understood how bad the situation was.
| Ammann promptly began fixing things and we see the fruits
| of that today.
|
| Ammann's departure, to the best of our knowledge, is a
| result of a conflict with GM's CEO regarding the future of
| Cruise as a business.
|
| Hopefully Vogt can preserve, and successfully build on,
| what Ammann accomplished.
| omeze wrote:
| fully appreciate if you can't go into detail, but what
| changed? It seems like they'd always been working towards
| robotaxi-ing from a product perspective so it must have
| come down to execution-level stuff, no?
| jowday wrote:
| If anything, I got the impression Dan had a pretty good handle
| on the technical aspects of Cruise and the path forward for the
| company, and that the GM CEO fired him because she didn't like
| what she was hearing from him. Dan wanted to pursue expanding
| Cruise robotaxis, while Mary Barra wanted to find ways to
| integrate Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars - that's
| not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such
| integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion
| of the stack.
|
| There was also reporting that Kyle was offered this role
| immediately after Dan was fired but turned it down, opting to
| remain interim CEO while they searched for a replacement. Looks
| like something has changed, or they couldn't find a suitable
| replacement.
| mikeryan wrote:
| GM was also ready to get into bed with Nikola which was an
| obvious pile of bullshit even before the Hindenburg report.
| I'd not want to be the one holding the bag there while
| management scrambles to catch up. Probably the best for him
| to get out now.
| ajross wrote:
| > [integrating] Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars
| [is] not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any
| such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge
| portion of the stack.
|
| That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are
| UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the
| driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking
| is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts
| are.
|
| Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the point
| work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch of
| special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and
| wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular
| passenger cars.
| [deleted]
| jowday wrote:
| I work in the AV space, so I guess you'll just have to
| trust me. I assume Cruise internals look very similar to
| the internals at other AV companies, which I think is a
| safe assumption.
|
| >The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be
| identical, and that's where the hard parts are.
|
| Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming
| down but we're still a while off from incorporating it into
| consumer vehicles - and we're way, way off from
| incorporating multiple high resolution, long range LIDAR
| pucks, plus short range LIDAR to cover blind spots, plus
| imaging radar, plus thermal cameras, etc. into commercial
| cars the way they're integrated into Cruise cars right now.
|
| Automotive decision making will also be extremely
| different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD
| maps that are continuously updated. It's impossible to
| scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a
| consumer car. Fundamental parts of the stack assume these
| maps are present and accurate - remove that assumption and
| a ton of things have to be rethought from first principles.
|
| Remote support is also a key part of AV stacks - that is,
| asking a human to clarify an ambiguous situation. There's a
| video where Kyle says that Cruise cars request remote
| support approximately every 5 minutes. Again, fundamental
| parts of the stack rely on the availability of remote
| support and have to be rethought from first principles if
| it's removed.
|
| This isn't even getting into the differences in compute on
| a Crusie car and a consumer car.
|
| >Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the
| point work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch
| of special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and
| wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular
| passenger cars.
|
| I mean you're not wrong, but you can't create a robotaxi
| without this. ML models just aren't capable enough to
| handle edge cases in a safe way without tons of hacks in
| place.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| But that's not what Tesla is doing! You're absolutely
| right and it's also a safer route (for others on the
| road) to go with robotaxis first. This is precisely why
| you can't focus too much on competitors. GM and their CEO
| (who seems to be really smart) is focusing on Tesla here
| and trying to compete with them.
| jowday wrote:
| Tesla isn't focused on robotaxis - they're focused on
| trying to sell a premium ADAS feature their CEO over
| promised half a decade ago. Whcih is necessarily designed
| very differently from a robotaxi. It doesn't make sense
| to try to force a stack built for robotaxis into a
| consumer ADAS car because you'd have to fundamentally
| rewrite the stack anyways. This is why GM had its own
| ADAS team while Cruise focused on robotaxis. I'm sure
| they're looking at Teslas market cap and hoping they can
| generate hype by trying to say they'll integrate Cruise
| tech, but that's just not how these stacks works.
| judge2020 wrote:
| That's exactly what OP is saying - GM is focusing on
| 'compete with Tesla' rather than pushing for
| progress/allowing Cruise to progress the technology on
| their own schedule.
| jowday wrote:
| And I'm saying it doesn't make sense to do that with
| Cruise's stack.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Automotive decision making will also be extremely
| different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD
| maps that are continuously updated. It's impossible to
| scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a
| consumer car._
|
| What are the challenges here? Is it simply the different
| scale required on the backend to handle tens (hundreds?)
| of millions of privately-owned cars, vs. that required
| for orders of magnitude fewer robotaxis? If so, I don't
| think that's all that insurmountable. I guess one thing
| that would worry me there would be bandwidth on that
| scale, as well as what happens when a privately-owned car
| is taken into an area where it doesn't have connectivity.
| I assume a robotaxi would just refuse to go where it
| can't talk to the internet, while that would be
| unacceptable for a private car to do. (Then again, the
| private car could still have manual drive controls, and
| require a driver to take over when internet connectivity
| is lost.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Not going to give my name for obvious reasons, but formerly
| at Cruise. Any sufficiently complex system has lots of
| hidden assumptions that aren't trivial to unwind when
| changing problem domains. I can think of at least a few
| design decisions I personally made that will have to
| revisited for personal vehicles. It's not impossible, but
| still nontrivial.
| cyrux004 wrote:
| I have been keep tracking of the story as an outsider and
| this is my impression as well
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the
| founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not
| understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.
|
| I'd be hesitant to generalize this lesson. Another case of
| "adult supervision", in that case against the wishes of the
| founders, was.... Eric Schmidt at Google. Say what you want
| about Google, but it's difficult to say that they weren't
| successful under his tenure (2001-2011)
| martythemaniak wrote:
| You know, I think the Vision vs LIDAR is very narrow and won't be
| very relevant in the long-term. If you imagine the full robotaxi
| stack: cars, training, simulations, back testing, data sourcing,
| perception, driving decisions, etc, etc, the LIDAR vs Vision
| concerns only one small part of the stack.
|
| Critically, LIDAR still has to be trained in the same way cameras
| have to - it'll give you depth information, but you still have to
| make it accurate decide whether some 3D blob is a person, sign,
| etc. LIDAR does not help you recognize street markings, interpret
| signs etc.
|
| That is the big question is: what is cheaper/faster: cheap
| sensors and more training, or more expensive sensors and less
| training. As LIDAR and training both get cheaper, it might not
| end up making much of a difference in the end. Companies will be
| successful based on how well they execute on the full stack and a
| slight edge in one area might not be enough to overcome problems
| elsewhere.
| ketzo wrote:
| That's sort of like saying "the touchscreen is only one small
| part of the iPhone. The OS, the native apps, the camera, the
| App Store, app developers, hardware accessories, repair service
| are all part of the stack."
|
| You're right, but that "small part" is _absolutely critical_ to
| get right. It's what allows the rest of the stack to be built;
| without that cornerstone, there's no product.
|
| There had been many attempts at touch controls for computers
| before the iPhone. Other smartphones were trying. None of them
| were remotely close to what Apple achieved with their first
| capacitive screen, and that began a massive change in the way
| people interacted with their device, and changed the world.
|
| It's like saying your roof is only "a small part of" your
| house. You're right, on some level, but without that roof,
| there's not much point in a really nice kitchen.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Huge fan of Kyle and the Cruise team. I remember covering Cruise
| in a class assignment back in 2014, and was very skeptical of the
| idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners. Ever
| since, they've gotten acquired (or something) and are holding up
| their own against behemoths in the space. Cruise's reviews on
| Blind are pretty bad, something that keeps me away from joining
| them as an employee, but I suppose chaos and uncertainty is the
| price one pays for the ambition to achieve something as wild.
| cyrux004 wrote:
| > and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving
| kits to existing car owners
|
| The good thing is we have comma.ai that works across a wide
| variety of vehicles.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| I am not as familiar with comma's product, but in 2014, self
| driving tech was out there enough as an idea for startups to
| invest in (ie Google moonshot level dreamy), let alone build
| kits that would retrofit into existing cars and actually
| work. Thanks for sharing about comma.ai!
| [deleted]
| dr_ wrote:
| Prediction: This is a prelude to becoming the CEO of GM. How well
| it works is important to the future of the company. From what
| I've read (Farhad Manjoo's article in the NYTimes about the new
| Escalade), it seems like it's fairly impressive.
| jowday wrote:
| The ADAS system in the Escalade has nothing to do with Cruise
| (confusingly). It's developed by an in-house ADAS team at GM.
| Unlikely Kyle wants to become CEO of GM. Until recently the
| message seemed to be that Cruise was going to operate as it's
| own company.
| walrus01 wrote:
| From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I
| recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test
| vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR +
| camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation
| computer.
|
| This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their
| engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems
| only.
|
| Somebody at Cruise commented that their intention is to drive
| down the cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale and
| better technology.
|
| My personal belief is that the data acquired from LIDAR
| representing a at-this-moment-in-time snapshot of a vehicle's
| surroundings is very valuable, and Cruise is probably going down
| the right path with this.
|
| Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a
| _human_ who can make snap judgments about what 's going on in a
| scene (eg: a pedestrian wearing a black or dark blue jacket who
| is walking a black or brown labrador retriever across an unmarked
| crosswalk in Seattle level mid winter rain, at night time,
| something I literally saw just two nights ago).
| XCSme wrote:
| > Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect
| of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in
| a scene
|
| Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than
| humans?
|
| (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement
| though).
| siddarthd2919 wrote:
| No, not with edge cases detection. In the Lidar vs Camera
| context - Camera depth models have a lot of room to improve
| jeffbee wrote:
| LOL no, not even remotely close. ML image classifiers will
| decide that an otter is a bicycle with some invisible (to
| humans) noise injected into the chroma. And that's state-of-
| the-art classifiers, which Tesla does not possess.
| XCSme wrote:
| I am asking mostly because the image captchas are starting
| to be really tough for humans, but ML can easily detect
| cars, boats and road signs.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| There are certain tasks where the models can do better than
| certain kinds of human effort (e.g. can do better than a
| person who is tired from doing a thousand of these in a row,
| is paying very little attention, is spending very little
| time, and doesn't really care), but that hasn't translated
| into actually doing image recognition better than humans.
| jowday wrote:
| > Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than
| humans?
|
| On some benchmarks, AI models are better at very well defined
| tasks like image classification ("label this image from a set
| of 8 labels you've seen before") or object detection ("draw a
| box around all instances of class X in this image, where X is
| a very narrowly defined class") They're not even close to
| being able to understand unscene examples and parse out their
| meaning in a larger context the way humans can. ("Recognize
| that this object in the road is a human riding some sort of
| bizarre unicycle he welded himself, then predict how he's
| likely to move given the structure of his custom unicycle
| thing")
|
| The bottleneck in AVs isn't "perception" in the sense of
| image classification and object detection, it's deeper scene
| understanding and abstract reasoning.
| XCSme wrote:
| In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene
| understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be
| some extra input data to the ML model.
| nicoburns wrote:
| LIDAR data contains highly accurate depth information, at
| which point you don't _need_ the abstract reasoning
| nearly so much. You can at least do basic object tracking
| and collision prevention without it.
| jowday wrote:
| The sort of abstract reasoning I'm talking about is
| beyond the capabilities of any ML model that will run
| onboard a car - the "abstract reasoning" problem in AVs
| right now is solved primarily through HD mapping and
| remote assistance.
|
| LIDAR is useful for a ton of other reasons - ground truth
| depth, high visibility at night, great for localization -
| and can detect if something's an obstacle or not without
| having seen it before (but false positives can be an
| issue).
|
| Broadly speaking, people who focus on Camera vs LiDAR are
| missing the mark and don't understand that the real
| difference between big AV players and consumer cars is HD
| maps and remote support.
| z2 wrote:
| I've been out of it for a while, but my understanding is that
| humans are still better at video recognition and extracting
| high-level information from moving videos, while the state of
| the art CV still tends to focus on rapid frame-by-frame
| static classification, with some semblance of motion
| persistence and motion strung together at the end.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are
| currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them
| to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're
| going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap."
| They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment
| operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to
| vision only if it turns out vision only isn't going to work.
|
| They are an engineering company, and they will attempt to
| engineer their way out of the wrong decision (vision only) if
| they have to in order to deliver.
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-
| radar-e...
|
| [2] https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf (Page 3-4,
| rich point cloud data, improved velocity resolution from 60GHz
| sensors, looks a lot like the benefits you'd get from LIDAR)
| gcheong wrote:
| Yeah it has all the hallmarks of "we can build a fully
| automated plant - well turns out that humans are still way
| better at some things". I hope they figure out if this path
| is a dead end, at least in the short term, or not sooner than
| later though.
| vardump wrote:
| "test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz
| [1]"
|
| I thought that radar was inside cabin only, to detect kids,
| etc.?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I thought the same, but have seen multiple product sheets
| and marketing materials from various manufacturers of this
| equipment describing it being used for exterior scene
| building and object discrimination (with about 40 meters of
| range). Continental (well known for its forward looking
| radar for automatic emergency braking) has a similar
| product that operates at ~77GHz.
| wbl wrote:
| There's a word for engineers that program cars to break the
| law resulting in deaths, and one of the first law codes
| specifies the appropriate punishment.
|
| Tesla is not operating in a way any ethical engineer should
| tolerate.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to
| their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not
| disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900
| million to the United States government _in 2014_ [1].
| Tesla 's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2].
|
| Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first
| stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_s
| witch...
|
| [2] https://tesladeaths.com/
| jdlshore wrote:
| Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't
| excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.
| onethought wrote:
| It's not whataboutism.
|
| - Autopilot has been "on" during 12 fatal crashes. It's a
| level 2 driver assist so it isn't "responsible" for those
| deaths, the driver is. Autopilot data shows it improves
| safety. Could you explain the unethical part?
|
| - The ignition recall, GM knew it was a problem, and it
| was. The unethical part is super clear.
|
| These aren't equivalent at all. Actually this highlights
| the bad faith attacks on Tesla. There are reasonable
| controversial decisions to be discussed with Tesla's
| approach. But safety isn't one of them, they have the
| safest cars on the roads and the lowest crash/fatality
| rate.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I don't believe Autopilot, a robust driver assist system
| with substantial safeguards, is irresponsible (as someone
| who has used it for ~60k miles of travel). I do believe
| allowing people to die because you don't want to replace
| a defective ignition switch is. That's not whataboutism,
| it's pointing out hypocrisy. NHTSA believes Autopilot is
| safe enough to continue to allow its use on public roads.
| What makes a random HN participant a superior authority
| on the topic than them? It's unsafe because someone here
| believes so? 3700 people die _per day_ from auto
| accidents and 12 deaths _total_ while Autopilot was
| active is irresponsible?
|
| Death is unavoidable, only preventable on a scale. To
| expect zero deaths is unreasonable.
| judge2020 wrote:
| To add, they also often have Lidar vehicles roaming around
| their Fremont factory and design center in Hawthorne, so
| they're definitely not ruling out any specific technology if
| it happens to provide measurable improvements at some time.
| jowday wrote:
| It's very likely those LIDAR vehicles are used to gather
| ground truth to train depth models or calibrate sensors.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is patently what will happen when the time comes (if
| needed) that I'm surprised more people don't realize it.
|
| Companies do it all the time - I'm not even sure it's really
| lying (as they "collectively" believe they'll be able to do
| it) but they are willing to pivot when the time is right.
|
| Apple's famously done it - the App Store was never to be at
| first.
| bluGill wrote:
| My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are
| things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in
| dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to
| do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog,
| but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road,
| but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at
| dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I come of the top
| of hills and trust there is nothing on the other side where I
| can't see until I'm over the top and it would be too late.
| Backup cameras have been very useful, and take away something I
| would have said a few years ago.
|
| The above is situations I know of offhand hand were my vision
| isn't up to the task yet I do anyway - because I don't really
| have other options. If other sensors can outdo me then I want
| them.
| paganel wrote:
| > I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust
| that the road is clear
|
| Not sure how to say it, but try to never do that going
| forward, please, for your sake and for the sake of the others
| who share the same road with you. Yes, driving "blind" for
| one second, maybe two seconds (even though it's uncomfortable
| for me at this point) from time to time is not the end of the
| world, particularly if you're driving straight and you had
| "scanned" the road in front of you beforehand, but driving
| while "trusting" in others will get you into accidents. Never
| drive faster than you can see.
| joenathanone wrote:
| LiDAR can't see through fog either, Radar and Ultrasonics can
| but from my understanding those are only used as secondary
| sensors.
| epgui wrote:
| That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just
| because a human is at the wheel.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think that was the parent's point. These things
| could be made safer with other detection technologies
| beyond plain cameras. A human driver can make a conscious,
| nuanced decision to make these "faith-based decisions", but
| a computer may not be able to. So perhaps it might just
| completely refuse to drive in those situations if all it
| has is a camera, but it can't see anything due to fog or
| terrain, even if it would be _somewhat_ safe for a human to
| drive in that situation.
| epgui wrote:
| It's really not clear to me what gives a human the
| nearly-magical ability to make decisions that a computer
| could not possibly make.
|
| If anything, I think we've seen that computers are much
| better than humans at making decisions in an ever-
| expanding set of narrow contexts (eg.: chess, go, protein
| folding...). It's not so much a matter of "can a computer
| do it better", it's more a question of "when are we going
| to figure out how to break down the problem in a way that
| a computer can solve much better than a human".
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| i hope you at least slow down around blind bends and corners.
| that shit is scary. see people racing over such obstacles all
| the time. i assume there will instead be a crash or deer or
| corgi or child hiding behind every obstacle
| sroussey wrote:
| And you can just shine a Q-beam at such a car.
| judge2020 wrote:
| You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading
| right into a concrete barrier, and pretty much every lane-
| keeping system will follow them.
| infinityio wrote:
| > You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading
| right into a concrete barrier
|
| To paraphrase XKCD [0] - if you want to cause accidents,
| there are other failure mechanisms that'd work on humans as
| well
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1958/
| nbardy wrote:
| I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in
| computer vision changes everything.
|
| Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set
| STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from
| LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR
| data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here
| where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to
| be the key for building model backbones that you can retrain
| for downstream tasks.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| How much of that camera data is labeled for distance
| measurement use cases?
| vardump wrote:
| Because cars (generally) move, probably most of it. You can
| compare successive frames and make predictions.
| jowday wrote:
| I don't think image+text pair models (E.G. CLIP) would be
| very useful for AV tasks. They're not very good at fine-
| grained classification or counting the number of instances in
| a scene. Not even getting into latency or model size.
| rhacker wrote:
| 8+ responding distance dots that are much closer than they
| should be are already a STOP, APPLY BREAKS situation where
| not much ML is even needed. That's the beauty of LIDAR. It
| will save lives unlike Tesla's driving into obvious
| poles/truck booms mistaken for a statue of liberty in
| Nebraska.
| Traster wrote:
| So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Some guy decides a
| trillion dollar company should discard an entire dataset for
| no reason, and as a result a decade late the company can
| finally actually do the job, thus proving the guy ?right?
| kelnos wrote:
| I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in
| aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on
| them are _ugly_ as sin. That really doesn 't jive with Tesla's
| brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be
| aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range.
|
| Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form
| cannot always come before function.
| madamelic wrote:
| > I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in
| aesthetics.
|
| I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It
| seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty
| well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got
| extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new
| sensors.
|
| Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case
| works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond that and have
| the cars become superhuman rather than having to depend on
| all sensors to consistently be working to have a safe
| vehicle.
| fieldcny wrote:
| Just to state the obvious, that assumes other sensors are
| net additive.
|
| I'm not sure how valid an assumption that is, they could
| wind up just adding complexity and creating noise.
| jseliger wrote:
| This interview with MobileEye:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-...
| says they're going to release hardware for level 4 autonomy by
| 2024 or 2025.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That's because Kyle competed with MIT in the DARPA Grand
| Challenge, which is where the architecture for the modern
| driverless car was battle tested. LIDAR was by far and away
| _the_ enabling technology in those competitions. Every team
| that finished in the DUC had a Velodyne 64 LIDAR. They are that
| important.
|
| For whatever reason, Tesla has decided to eschew this hard-
| earned wisdom, have treated their customers and the general
| public as an extension of their corporate research lab and
| their customers and others have paid the price for it with
| their lives.
|
| During the DUC, contestants competed in an abandoned military
| base in the middle of the desert. In that environment, the
| vehicles were outfitted with all matter of flashing lights,
| emergency stop procedures, and all humans had to clear the
| area. That's what robot research was like in 2007. And our cars
| didn't have a verified track record of deaths!
|
| Little did we know at the time, we could've just done this
| research in the middle of downtown SF. Apparently we wouldn't
| even have needed to inform the unwitting public that an
| experiment involving a 2 ton machine that has killed people in
| the past was taking place in their midst.
| WWLink wrote:
| Don't forget, Tesla uses cheap 1280x960 cameras (citation
| needed - they may have upgraded)... pointing out a potentially
| dirty windshield.
| ahmedalsudani wrote:
| Not sure about the resolution, but the sensor is rather
| large. Resolution isn't nearly as important as being able to
| see clearly in low light.
|
| Re: dirty windshield. Humans see through those, and we have
| windshield wipers if visibility is impeded.
|
| I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision
| alone has done a remarkable job.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| > I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but
| vision alone has done a remarkable job.
|
| Not for Tesla. So many interventions. So many situations
| where the car actively tries to kill the driver and
| pedestrians.
| onethought wrote:
| But it's not finished. Have you asked Cruise testers how
| many interventions they have had to do in equivalent
| drives as Tesla FSD Beta?
|
| It's strange to me that Tesla who are building this in
| the open are criticised for being dishonest. Meanwhile
| ALL the competitors are closed door private development
| and some how we should trust them more? In an industry
| that is known for deceitful behaviour.
| markstos wrote:
| Cars are already complex enough to make them vulnerable to
| global supply chain challenges. The more tech that's required
| to put a car on the road, the more challenged that manufacturer
| is going to be have enough inventory of all the components to
| actually ship cars.
|
| I agree that LIDAR is valuable and hope all these companies are
| all able make safe cars with their tech stacks.
| [deleted]
| judge2020 wrote:
| The thing is that I can't find any examples of Tesla's vision
| only system in FSD Beta not detecting any objects - all the
| failures are on the 'driving AI' side, ie. it makes the bad
| decision to try to turn right into a cyclist despite the
| cyclist being displayed on the center screen[0].
|
| 0:
| https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?...
| jowday wrote:
| There are tons of examples of objects flickering in and out
| of existence, not being detected, warping in weird ways. This
| is one of the most recent tweets from a prominent Tesla
| reverse engineer with plenty of examples.
|
| https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923
| spikels wrote:
| But obviously if it _can_ be done with just cameras, that's
| going to be the winning solution (cheaper, simpler, etc).
|
| Let's try a diverse set of strategies and see which one wins in
| the real world. Nobody knows for sure at this point.
| shrubble wrote:
| I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous
| cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather
| and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory
| hurdles.
|
| Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean
| something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed
| every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT
| that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected
| because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take
| all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25
| billion market cap.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap.
|
| Uber alone has a market cap nearly 3x that and they have
| explicitly said they will only become profitable as an
| autonomous taxi co. Tesla is worth nearly a Trillion on its
| own. Where do you get 25B from?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It's a bit frustrating because if all calls were mostly
| autonomous we could likely have less traffic deaths within a
| few years. Self driving cars are already great at making snap
| judgements. Better than most humans. They also make a lot less
| stupid mistakes than humans do.
|
| The edge cases are the hard part. A human knows what to do when
| a random construction worker or cop is directing traffic. Self
| driving car? Not so much.
| jowday wrote:
| > Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean
| something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed
| every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT
| that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected
| because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take
| all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a
| $25 billion market cap.
|
| You can safely assume most of the major players have thought
| through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons. In
| this case, you wouldn't be able to rely on these external
| sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you'd necessarily be
| forced to build the capabilities to operate without them
| anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications
| and trying to deal with different standards and models and
| interop adds a ton of complexity.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > You can safely assume most of the major players have
| thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good
| reasons
|
| I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If
| it is something other than all the big car companies refuse
| play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.
| jowday wrote:
| I mean, I described the reason. The other thing is that
| perception the way you're thinking about it isn't a huge
| problem for AVs. They're generally able to recognize all of
| the objects and elements they need to from their onboard
| sensors. The problem is a lack of deeper understanding of
| what they're seeing, not a lack of viewing angles or range.
| And more range/angles won't fix that.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Let's assume your proposal -- wires in the road to aid
| lane-keeping -- works perfectly. What does it get us aside
| from lane-keeping? That's far from the hardest problem. It
| doesn't account for stopped vehicles, cyclists,
| pedestrians, deer, or any of the other things human drivers
| commonly encounter and avoid without fanfare. Even if we
| imagine some sort of car-utopia where only AV vehicles are
| allowed on your perfect roads it doesn't account for common
| vehicle malfunctions like blown tires.
|
| You shouldn't IMO scope the problem only to lane-keeping.
| That's a very small part of the problem space. Solutions
| aimed at only that problem still leave the most important
| problems untouched.
| pm90 wrote:
| I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating
| with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about
| it.
|
| > In this case, you wouldn't be able to rely on these
| external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you'd
| necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate
| without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local
| communications and trying to deal with different standards
| and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.
|
| Well, yeah nobody said it was easy. But, it does seem like
| something that _could work_ , whereas we _know_ that fully
| autonomous is just not possible with the tech we have today.
| jowday wrote:
| Define "fully autonomous" - we have driverless cars in
| Phoenix and San Francisco right now - granted, with some
| pretty narrow constraints. Not as narrow as "needs custom
| hardware installed along every road to work"
|
| Another thing to understand is that perception in the way
| you're imagining these cameras would work isn't really an
| issue for AVs right now. I don't think the problem you're
| describing is a real blocker for AVs.
| madamelic wrote:
| > I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating
| with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about
| it.
|
| Collabing with DoT is a terrible idea imo.
|
| Anyone who has seen anything any DoT in America has tried
| to do in the last few decades should immediately know why.
| It will cost an astronomical amount of money along with an
| equal time length.
|
| To put "wires in road", it would likely be a project on the
| scale of trillions and 50+ year deadline. It won't happen,
| it's more feasible to solve the problem of how to have
| smart cars on dumb roads rather than relying on bloated and
| corrupt DoT & contractors to do the work of making smart
| roads.
|
| This isn't even to mention the likely quagmire of what
| happened with early railroads where the rails laid by
| different companies weren't compatible with each other and
| you had to switch to an entirely different train to
| continue your journey.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-28 23:00 UTC)